House of Red Dreaming
by Arazsya
Summary: Red (adjective) - of a colour at the end of the spectrum next to orange and opposite violet, as of blood, fire or rubies. Set post-Series 4.
1. Chapter 1

Ahead, the road fell away into white. The rain had grown so heavy that Chandler was sure the windows would be covered in scratches by the time that they reached their destination. Its rattle tapped on every surface like restless fingers, the shell of the car dangerously thin between them and the downpour. The windscreen was a deluge, no matter how quickly the wipers struggled, frantic, across it.

Miles kept driving, his jaw like a bulldog's, stubborn and uncompromising. Every time he changed gear, the vehicle thudded, juddering the bones of the occupants, and no one spoke to cover it. They had nothing to speak about.

Chandler sat in the passenger seat and tried not to think about how this was the longest he had ever heard his DCs go without talking, or about the piece of paper that he hadn't known what to do with, about the shadow of an old woman in headlamps.

_Team-building_, Anderson had told him. That meant _you're broken_. And they were. They had started fracturing almost as soon as he had arrived, so long ago, all ties and frustration. He hadn't expected to stay for so long. But, with the papers that he hadn't quite started to fill out, it wouldn't be much longer.

"Maybe the rain will stop," Buchan said hopefully, banished to what, with both seats down, would have been the boot, their luggage piled precariously up beside him. It was a desperate attempt to start conversation, and it fell through before it had even reached the back seat proper, muffled by the silence that held court there. DC Riley had placed herself between Kent and Mansell, but seemed unwilling to speak with either of them, staring stubbornly straight ahead while they glared out of a window each, a Whitechapel CID coat of arms.

Chandler's tongue had grown too used to having nothing to say to etch itself into a reply, and Buchan glanced down, as if accepting that there was nothing that he could do about the quiet.

"Turn left," the SatNav ordered, and Miles did as he was told.

He hoped the silence was just the shock, or the rain, forcing all other sounds away. That somehow, his DCs had forgiven one another or been brought back together in the face of adversity. But the worst possibility lurked in his brain like a tumour, the idea that they had managed to fracture further and deeper than could ever be repaired.

Something constricted in Kent's pale throat, and his eyes turned away from the window. Chandler met them, realised that he had been looking back for more than the four seconds acceptable in the wake of Buchan's comment, and jerked his head back to facing the front.

Ahead, a distant, blurred shape struggled to resolve itself from the rain, distorted in the water until it might have been anything. A gargoyle, clawing its way out of the earth, Chandler thought distractedly, and then tried to find something, _anything_, else. Its aspect cleared as Miles brought them closer. A tall building, buttressed against the wind, given spines by the rivulets of rain on the glass.

He narrowed his eyes at a sign too covered in moss for him to pick out lettering, trying to read it anyway, but gave in as the wheels of the car scudded a slurry of water up over the window.

"Arriving at destination on left," the SatNav informed them, then silenced itself with a disappointed-sounding bleep.

Miles turned into what Chandler hoped was a driveway, the car indicator's flash glancing off the raindrops and struggling back toward home. The engine cut out abruptly, and they sat and stared at the house, the hope that Miles had put the postcode in wrong visible in the creasing on their foreheads.

There was a movement from the side of the building, and a humbug-striped umbrella appeared, bobbing its way toward the car. It stopped at the drivers' side, a black-gloved hand emerging from beneath to knock.

The window whirred down, though there was barely a crack of fresh air before it whined to a halt. Chandler's jaw tightened, convinced that it felt the splash of the rain onto his features anyway.

"Detective Inspector Chandler?" demanded the umbrella, voice twisting into a Welsh lilt.

Miles indicated Chandler shortly with a jerk of one hand. "He is. DS Miles. These are DCs Riley, Kent and Mansell, and Mister Buchan."

"Thornton. Welcome to Tŷ Gors," the umbrella said blandly. "I'm sure you're all very glad to see it. It's what, five hours from Whitechapel?"

"Took us six," Miles replied, tactfully ignoring the former. "You have any more umbrellas?"

"It's only water," the umbrella announced, lifting enough for Chandler to catch a glimpse of the bearer's impressive chin. "Would you like to come inside?"

There was a moment of hesitation, then Mansell slammed his door open and scrambled ungracefully out. Kent and Riley were gone a moment later, and before their seatbelts had finished sliding away, Miles was ducking under their host's umbrella.

Chandler made to join them, only for a sudden clattering from the boot to yank his attention back around. Buchan had stood up, shouldering into Riley's bag, but seemed at a loss as to what else to do.

"Um, Joe, how do I get out?" he called, voice mottled with hesitations.

"There are instructions on the back of the seat in front," Chandler informed him, turning his collar up and stepping out into the downpour. The first few wet impacts against his head were like miniature slaps, and he cursed his lack of foresight in not bringing an umbrella of his own.

By the time he reached the porch, the rain had soaked through to his skin, and he was convinced that he could feel its brackish taste in his mouth. Blinking the moisture from his eyes, he gave the narrow hallway a cursory glance, and decided that the days could not possibly go quickly enough. The cinderblock of the walls was pockmarked and scratched, and he did his best not to look at the ceiling, where he knew he would see damp and cobwebs.

"Pauline's just finishing up with dinner," their host announced, hooking his umbrella onto a peg. For a moment, Chandler considered leaving his coat in the same place, but the dust that billowed into the air in the wake of Thornton's movement convinced him otherwise.

"I'll show you to your rooms, and if you like you can change your clothes, then we can eat." Thornton paused for a moment, as if trying to remember something, then reached a box down from a shelf. "Phones, please."

"What do you want our phones for?" Mansell demanded, hand going protectively to his pocket and hovering there.

"We find that phones tend to provide an excuse not to acknowledge the existence of other humans." Their host opened the box with a snarl of hinges, revealing an old Nokia rattling around in the bottom. His voice changed, some of the lightness burning away. "Phones, please."

Buchan was the first to surrender his, and the others gave theirs up with narrow eyes.

Their host smiled pleasantly, regimented teeth showing. "There's no signal here, anyway," he said, his tones returning to their former pleasantness. "If you need to make any personal calls, we have a landline. Ask Pauline if you need it." With that, he closed the box with a noise that sounded like a full stop, locked it, and returned it to its shelf. "There. No need for you to worry about them going missing."

"Our bags?" Miles inquired, glancing back outside without enthusiasm.

"Pauline will fetch them," their host announced. He was older than Chandler had been expecting. Beneath the sagging flesh of his face, his skull moved with the words, slack skin pooling in his eye-sockets. "If you would all follow me."

Thornton approached the stairs like someone whose feet had been replaced by twin wooden clubs, the noise of them ricocheting up into the beams. The steps creaked under his tread, and Chandler eyed them dubiously.

"It's perfectly safe," Thornton informed them, without turning.

Miles shook his head and followed, and the others trailed after him. Mansell's hand still lingered, bereft, over where his phone had been, as if he had envisaged spending the whole time texting with Erica like a technologically savvy turtle-dove.

They crowded onto the first floor landing as Thornton indicated the doors at the end, and then those closer to the stairs. "DS Miles, DC Kent, DI Chandler, Mister Buchan, this is your floor. DC Riley, DC Mansell, follow me, you're upstairs, I hope neither of you has a problem with heights."

For a moment, Chandler stood where he had stopped, and then he moved to try the door that Thornton had directed him to. The handle was cold against his skin, and he shivered reflexively, but it turned easily enough, without the protesting squeal that he had half-expected.

The room beyond was, thankfully, clean and ordered. A bed against one wall, a cabinet beside it, and not a whole lot else. Painted off-white, it seemed catalogue-new, almost unfinished. Even the books lining the bottom of the cupboard, had creaseless spines. He almost picked one of them up, but the dripping of the rain from his sleeves convinced him otherwise.

Chandler left his coat over a swallow-tail hook on the back of the bathroom door, finding himself more or less dry underneath, and went to see if the mysterious Pauline needed any help with the bags. They were waiting just outside his room. Frowning, he glanced up and down the landing, but there was no one in sight. Only the others' luggage, left neatly beside their doors, like his.

He withdrew, carrying his bags inside before he headed back downstairs. The steps whined with the pressure as if they had been riddled with woodworm, but there was no give and, as far as he could see, no holes.

The others were waiting in the dining room, sitting around a table that didn't look affordable on the budget of a team-building centre, all deep mahogany swirls and immaculately polished gleam. Chandler took a seat next to Miles and glanced suspiciously at the platters of food that were already lined up in the centre of the table.

"This Pauline is more efficient than all the serving staff in all the pubs in Whitechapel," Buchan announced, as if he were attempting to lighten the mood. No one responded. The smiles that they had sported when it seemed as if they had broken their curse had been shocked away, and Chandler couldn't imagine that there was potential for any of them to resurface.

Thornton strode into the room before the silence could stretch into a tacky breaking point, and took the seat at the head of the table, gesturing at their plates with a sweeping arm.

"Please," he said, in a tone of voice that was butler-perfect. "Serve yourselves."

There was a flurry of movement almost before the words had left his mouth. Chandler hung back, unwilling to compete with the others' jousting arms and lacking what even a generous person might have called an appetite.

"So, we out doing the thing with the balls and the pipes at dawn, then?" Miles asked, heaping his plate with potatoes.

"Not in this weather," Thornton replied, delicately selecting a piece of broccoli.

"Building the bridge with three slightly too short planks?" Miles suggested, jerking his head at Chandler. "He'll be able to do it, he's done a lot of courses."

"I'm afraid the closest we get to the conventional team building methods are a couple of trust exercises," Thornton informed him, knife slicing delicately into a piece of meat, cooked rare. The colour of it brought back a vivid image of Llewellyn's autopsy room, and Chandler swallowed uncomfortably.

"What _do_ you do, then?" Miles demanded, and his voice could have been lifted straight from the interrogation room tape.

"Have you ever read _The Shining_?"

Buchan's cutlery hit his plate, the sharp guillotine-clatter cutting the conversation away to silence. His widened eyes glinted like marbles in the scant light.

"I've seen the film," Mansell piped up, and the moment was gone. Thornton's teeth edged out into his smile.

"We find that the isolation and close quarters build a team better than any number of bridges." Thornton shrugged widely, light glancing off his cutlery with the movement. "That, or everyone kills each other."

Chandler did his best to laugh into the silence that followed, hoping that that was the reaction their host had been hoping for.

"Of course, before any of you do decide to commit murder," Thornton added, brightly. "Please bear in mind that you would die of exposure before reaching the nearest town, while making your escape."

"Duly noted," Miles muttered. "Won't Pauline be joining us?"

"No." Thornton delivered a shred of meat to his mouth and chewed it. "So, I hear things have been quite exciting in Whitechapel recently – the Ripper, the Krays, monsters in the walls. I'm surprised they didn't send you here sooner. Do you know who's doing your job while you're away?"

"I was assured that it was being taken care of," Chandler said, though Anderson hadn't told him who. Whoever they were, they wouldn't be using the station; someone was finally there to fix the issues with the building.

"Of course, of course." Thornton peered down toward the other end of the table, where the others were eating in silence, Kent's fork half-heartedly stabbing a carrot around his plate. "Your colleagues are very quiet."

"Bad case," Miles told him shortly.

"Aren't they all," Thornton mused, his mouthful evidently gone, though Chandler hadn't seen him swallow. "All of yours, anyway. Never brought in a man alive, as I understand it."

Chandler gritted his teeth as the dinner suddenly became as unpleasant as the one he had attended with Anderson during the Ripper case. The others' cutlery paused, as if everyone were holding their breath.

"We've saved lives," Kent announced, without looking up from his plate, though the carrot was granted a temporary reprieve.

"There are people who are alive at this moment who wouldn't be were it not for us," Buchan agreed quickly, brandishing his fork somewhere between making a point and threatening. "For example, the last victim of the New Ripper."

Chandler wondered for a moment whether or not they were just doing their best to make him feel better. He knew that the trend of bodies had started from the moment he had joined Whitechapel CID. And there was a part of him that, no matter how much he tried to rationalise, refused to believe in any coincidence. The word _curse_ was more acceptable to it.

"I didn't mean to offend," Thornton said blandly. "I'm sure that if there were anyone better to do the job, they would have replaced you years ago."

Somehow, he managed to make the compliment sound like an insult.

No one seemed to want to continue a conversation with him after that, and they ate in silence for a while, Chandler trying to force a slice of cottony Yorkshire pudding down his throat.

"Getting a bit gloomy, isn't it?" Thornton commented eventually, and stood to light the heavy candlestick in the centre of the table, the flame's reflection flickering in the brass. "Oh, and speaking of the dark, I must apologise if you hear sounds during the night. The piping's a bit old and it rattles sometimes. We've tried getting the plumber in, but there's very little incentive for him to come out here when he has plenty of jobs in town. That reminds me, if anyone starts feeling ill, let me know as soon as you can, it takes a while for Doctor Black to drive out here. Better for him to have a wasted journey than for one of you to start coughing up your lungs, and him be too far away."

At the other end of the table, Riley carefully put her cutlery down.

"Is everything alright with your rooms?" Thornton inquired, as if he didn't believe that his last glut of information required any digestion. "We do our best with them, but we still get complaints every now and again."

"Mine is fine," Buchan volunteered, and there was a vague affirmative murmuring from the rest of the diners.

"Power cuts are likely," Thornton went on, settling back into his seat and glancing at his hands as if he were trying to remember something. There was a red smudge over the back of his knuckles, and he hastily covered it with his other palm. "There should be candles and matches in your cabinets, and, if you need anything, Pauline and I are in the rooms upstairs."

"When do we start?" Chandler asked abruptly. For a moment, the sound of his own voice, absent for what felt like the last hour, startled him.

"Oh, we've already started," Thornton informed him, lips twisting with a puppet's smile. "But you can turn in, if you like. It's getting late, and I think that's everything that I needed to tell you."

He had pushed his chair out almost before the other man had finished speaking. It didn't matter whether it was an early start or not, he supposed. He couldn't stand another minute in Thornton's company.

The stairs were creaking underfoot before he realised that he hadn't said goodnight to Miles, or to anyone, and that perhaps he should have. Too late now, he decided, as his fingers reached out to close over the warm metal of his door handle.

Inside, he plucked a book from the cabinet without looking and settled on to the end of his bed, the sudden lack of company crushing its silence through his head in a way as overwhelming as an ocean wave. Glancing down, he found _To Kill A Mockingbird_, and he started to read. Or tried to, anyway. Every few minutes, one of the sentences failed and stuttered out in his brain, a noise like a dripping tap ratcheting along his consciousness.


	2. Chapter 2

Kent left not long after Chandler. He needed the silence, so that he could try and freeze all the wordless thoughts in his head down to harmless nothings. Try not to feel the rage building inside his head like steam, and know that the only way to release it was to snap.

He considered knocking on the DI's door on the way past, but his nails curled into his palm the moment he felt the impulse. As if the sudden quiet was some sort of sedative, his steps turned stumbling, but he kept walking. He wouldn't know what to say, anyway.

For a moment, he thought he saw his reflection in his door handle. He put his hand out to cover it, before his eyes could etch out the details that he didn't want to see. The metal seemed to burn against his fingers, and he recoiled, hissing, though on the second touch it was cool again. He shook his head, dismissing it, and pushed inside.

The curtains were drawn across the dark mirroring pane of the window almost before his mind caught up with the fact that he was in the room. He sat on the bed, considering the remainder of his surroundings. It was only when trying not to see his own face that he had realised just how many surfaces were reflective. He stripped off his watch and laid it face-down on the cabinet, only to jolt in shock as his shadow twisted against the wall.

Kent swallowed hard, wondering if he should head back downstairs to join Mansell and Riley in whatever card game they had started. Perhaps the anger, the knowledge of how his hands would feel if he struck with them, would be better than this.

Except, he wasn't sure if he'd be welcomed. Mansell seemed normal with him, most of the time, but sometimes he thought he felt the man's eyes on his back. As if they were trying to work out what fresh betrayal he would concoct next time, because as far as Mansell was concerned, he wasn't so much a friend anymore. Just a strange creature behind a face that was vaguely familiar. A creature who could drive him to suicide and then just leave him there on the edge, leave Riley trying to talk him down on her own.

If he were Mansell, he wouldn't trust him, either. He tried to tell himself that he had panicked, had never thought that losing Erica would affect Mansell so badly. On the whole, he accepted that, but the doubt still picked on the edge of his mind like a child with a scab. It wasn't the first time someone had died because of him, after all.

The room was too empty, Kent decided. Nothing to distract. But he didn't want to be with the others, either. Not when all he found in their company was the slow swell of his rage, and the frantic skittering of his thoughts as they tried to hide from it. As they told him that he shouldn't be feeling it, because Mansell hadn't said a word about Erica.

Eating, he had looked at his knife, and a cool, detached part of his brain had quietly informed him that he could probably do a lot of damage with it, if he tried. _I won't_, he had thought, and the part of his brain had agreed with him politely. _I know you won't_, it had said. _But you could. And maybe you might. _

He scrubbed at his eye sockets with one hand and reached for a book with the other, but his fingers couldn't get a grip on any of them. He moved to crouch beside the shelf, trying to see if something was jammed, and the titles of the novels scudded across his gaze. A frown dug itself deeper into his forehead, and he absently wondered whose macabre library they had been donated from.

Movement. His head jerked around so quickly that it unbalanced him, hands lifting in a desperate bid to protect himself, even as the rest of him scrabbled backwards until his spine crunched into the cabinet, but he would look this time, he would see them, he would be able to identify them because he would burn their features into his memory, he would do better this time, and –

Nothing there. Kent shut his eyes and let his head thud backwards into the cupboard. Flinching away from nothing. But his brain still stung with the sudden, fleeting thought that there had been _something_, his hands shaking.

Outside, the stairs creaked, and Kent's spine straightened, vertebrae grating against the edge of the cabinet. _Just Skip_, he told himself, but he couldn't help the panicked edge to his movements as he stood, his head swaying as if suddenly exhausted.

The bathroom had a mirror that covered most of one wall, like the one in the interview room. For a second, Kent wanted to shade it and see if there were eyes staring at him from the other side, but the edges of his reflection hazed, and he dropped his gaze to the sink. The white of the basin dragged his awareness toward a faintly septic smell, stinging his nose with the trace memory of hospital.

Someone had left a razor next to the toothpaste. The silver of the blade danced with flickering as, overhead, a moth fluttered frantic into the lightbulb. Kent watched it, entranced, hands wrapping white-knuckled around the cold porcelain of the sink.

_You could_, he informed himself. _You might. It's one course of action you might want to consider._

_You will_, announced his reflection in the mirror, a snaggle-toothed monster with a smile that snarled. Something that could describe the colour of blood in every language that mattered.

Then it was gone, and it was just his face, staring back at him, pallid and with eyes so wide it was a wonder that his soul hadn't already seeped away.

Feet on the stairs, and he hoped, desperately, that Mansell had decided to play some insane prank on him, that Riley wanted to make sure he wasn't ill, even that Ed had a ridiculous theory about the house which he wanted to air. Just so that he would hear a knock on the door that he couldn't open himself. He turned, so that he wouldn't take so long to answer it that they would leave.

They carried on up. Kent shut the bathroom door behind him, and wondered if there was a way for him to cover the mirror with a towel.

This time, he managed to take a book from the shelf, and he started to read, though the words spat and slurred rather than enter his head, and it took him what felt like hours to reach the end of the first page. Then, he couldn't remember what it had said, and closed the novel with a sigh. The black and red of the cover drew his eye and crackled in his brain, and he put it back onto the shelf before it could develop into a migraine.

He reached for his phone, to text Erica, or his flatmates, or Mansell, but it wasn't there. His fingers flopped into the phantom space where it should have been, and he settled back onto the bed, head knocking into a pillow which had missed its calling as a brick.

Kent shut his eyes, and the noises started. Elsewhere in the house, something creaked, and something else, something closer, skittered. It would be like trying to sleep outside in the middle of summer when the grasshoppers were striking out their cacophony. And he could almost taste the edge of the nightmares that waited in his skull.

Voices, at last. Kent sat up straight, recognising Mansell and Riley's tones, and tried to extract words. The walls were too thick for him to hear most of it, but it sounded as if Mansell were complaining about the lack of a television. Less subdued than they had been in the car, but then, they had all been waiting for the DI to say something, do something, that would indicate that they had been freed from the funerary silence.

They went out of earshot seconds later, but it was still enough normality for him to fill his head with for a little while longer, too distant to bring the rage. He lay back again, trying to get used to the noises of the house before he attempted sleep.

The red of the book cover was still there, buzzing in his ears.


	3. Chapter 3

"I can't believe he took our _phones_," Mansell said again. The words were as familiar to his mouth as words could get, scratching in his mind like a broken record, repeating every few minutes. Every few minutes, when his hand went unconsciously to his pocket to check for his phone, and found nothing there. Then would come the vague, distracted panic as his body assumed that he had lost it. His eyes would skip down to search, only to be drawn into the contorted faces in the wood of the stairs.

"I can see why he does it," Riley responded, her voice too reasonable and without any of the outrage that should have been there. She looked too tired to be indignant, her hair still scruffy with the rain and her expression painstakingly smooth, as if trying to ward off the inevitable tension headache. "We _are_ supposed to be talking to one another."

"Talking to one another, while we're all shut up in our separate rooms," Mansell commented dourly. "If they really wanted us to solve things by having no choice but to talk to one another, they should have given us bunk beds. We had bunk beds on school trips."

"I suppose you were always on the top bunk."

Mansell smirked at her in confirmation, and moved on to a more important topic. "You know what else we had on school trips? Electricity. Seriously, I haven't seen a single socket since we got here. How are we supposed to charge – oh." He tugged his tie away from his neck in an attempt to cover his slip, though she didn't seem to have noticed it.

"It's an old house," Riley pointed out, wincing as the stairs creaked. Perhaps she already had a headache. He supposed that, with the amount of noise the house made, it wouldn't be long before they all did.

"Lots of old houses have sockets – and televisions," Mansell countered, an arsenal of complaints about their accommodation blooming into his brain. "What are we supposed to do without a TV? Even the worst hotel I've ever stayed in had three channels."

"I think there are books in all the rooms," Riley announced, glancing upwards as if she were worried that Thornton would hear their comments and turn them out into the gorse to die of exposure. "You could try reading."

"I'm not sure that _Romeo and Juliet_ is my sort of thing," Mansell muttered as they turned onto their floor. The doors of the two unoccupied rooms opposite theirs almost seemed to have faces, the twists and knots in the wood mocking, and he shot them a narrow-eyed glare. "Neither is _King Lear_. What have you got?"

"A few crime novels by people who are either using pseudonyms or were fated to write murder books," Riley said, pausing outside his door. "I was thinking that it might be Thornton's idea of a joke. Have you got anything else besides Shakespeare?"

Mansell grimaced, the expression pulling his features in directions he had forgotten that they could go. "_War and Peace_. Honestly, I'd rather count the chips in the ceiling than start it."

Riley nodded, looking about as enthused by her options as he was.

"Tell you what," he suggested, glancing up the stairs to make sure that no one was coming. Thornton had said he was turning in for the night, but there had been no news on whether or not this Pauline he kept mentioning was still up. "There might be something better in one of the other rooms."

"I'm not sure that the others would be best pleased if you disturbed them," Riley said, the frown creeping out again. "And, knowing the boss, he's probably reading his."

"Not them." Mansell felt a touch of impatience leak into his tone. He gestured at the closed doors, his tie flopping around his fist with the movement. "_Them_."

"They're probably locked," Riley informed him, moving on toward her room, though she hesitated as her fingers brushed the doorknob.

"No harm in trying," he countered, and stepped across to the first one. The handle was warm beneath his hand, like a tepid autumn day, and he almost expected it to slide greasily free of his grip when he turned it. The lock juddered it out of motion, and Mansell moved on.

"Goodnight," Riley called, and he heard the click as she closed her door behind her.

"Night," he muttered, distractedly, and went to try the second room, without much hope. The handle just twisted uselessly, like a broken flag in a nuclear winter.

Mansell sighed and headed to his own door, cursing himself for not thinking to bring something other than cards. Another failed game of solitaire and his head would explode. But he didn't see that there was much of a choice – fifty-two card pickup was more optimistic than the endings of the books in his room.

The planks in his room stuck to the bottoms of his shoes like those in a pub, and he tried to imagine himself in one. Drinks with Erica, the crescendo of the beer-bottle conversation around them forcing their heads closer together. And he wasn't even going to be able to _text_ her for _days_.

Frustration tightened the tie around his hand, squeezing him from his thoughts, and he threw it into the gaping lip of his bag, face twisting. They needed a murderer they had arrested in court, in prison, not a bloody _team building session_.

It felt as if the walls around his room had muted everyone else away. They were thick, the sort of walls that defended castles, that kept the inmates away from one another in jail. There might not have been bars on the windows, but Mansell was fairly certain that the message was still _you stay here until you've made yourselves into a proper team again_. And that might take some time.

Perhaps, he mused as he changed for bed, there would be another murder in Whitechapel, and the top brass would call them back because no one else wanted to deal with homicide in a place whose name had been made famous by the serial killer that no one could catch.

Mansell turned out the light, and the sudden darkness fizzed as the bulb took to rest.

* * *

><p><em>AN_ - I should be uploading the next chapter as normal at some stage next Sunday, but it is NaNoWriMo this month and I am doing it, so I apologise in advance if what passes for regular uploading goes out the window. And, thank you for the very kind reviews! ^.^


	4. Chapter 4

By morning, the downpour had dwindled into a frantic drizzle that drove itself into the window in sharp, staccato beats, like insects on a motorway. Miles lay waiting for the day to brighten enough to indicate that it was time to get up, but it remained a muggy grey. Eventually, he thought he heard Buchan moving in the next room, and took that as his own personal alarm.

He had expected Thornton to come along knocking on their doors to wake them, but he heard no movement on the stairs, though he listened from the moment that he woke up. There was still nothing when he staggered blearily into a shower that spat water down at him like chips of warm hail, and couldn't hear anything but the whining of the pipes.

Chandler was already sitting at the dining table by the time Miles got there, neat as ever and reading through the previous day's paper, though the acrid scent of Tiger Balm betrayed the façade.

"Morning," Miles offered, taking the seat next to his boss and eyeing the lack of plates on the table. Their absence sat wrong with him, considering how well everything had been prepared the previous day. "You know what time breakfast is?"

"I've not seen Thornton this morning," Chandler replied, without looking up, though it was difficult to see what was so riveting about yesterday's news. They had heard some of it in the car, until the signal had cut out into a helpless gurgle of static. "And it doesn't sound like there's anyone in the kitchen."

"Late risers, then," Miles commented, checking his watch to make sure that it was still nine o'clock. "For a team building retreat, anyway. Would have thought they'd be waking us up at five thirty in the morning."

Chandler said nothing in reply, and Buchan was there before Miles could try to prompt anything. The historian filled the room with noise even though he hadn't said anything, peering around as if searching for something.

"Where did you get the paper?" Buchan asked eventually, as if he couldn't function before he had had his daily dose of intellectual stimulation, and Chandler glanced up.

"It was on the table when I got here," he said. "Someone's already done most of the crossword. Incorrectly, I'm afraid."

"Sudoku?" Buchan inquired, hopefully, and Chandler shook his head. The historian deflated, crestfallen, and Miles _almost_ felt sorry for him as he took a forlorn seat at the table, staring at the surface as if it had one of his precious files on it.

The minutes ticked past, and the only movement on the stairs was Kent, Riley and Mansell heading down, their faces as dour as the day outside the windows. Thornton remained as absent as if they had all somehow managed to imagine him.

"No one's found a note, or anything, have they?" Miles checked, glancing around to include all of them in the question.

Chandler shook his head, turning to the last page of the paper with a faint drifting of newsprint. Buchan shrugged, his attention fixed on the document as if he were a vulture waiting for an animal to die.

"What about you lot?" Miles prompted his DCs. "Any of you heard anything from Thornton?"

"He's not up yet?" Riley blinked in surprise, checking her watch. Confusion deepened the frown which fatigue had left on her features.

"I'll go and knock on his door," Mansell announced, and Miles watched him turn around, wondering what it was he wanted to complain about so much that he had created extra work for himself. Probably just wanted his phone back.

"Do you think we're meant to make ourselves breakfast?" Buchan pondered, only to snatch away the paper almost before Chandler had finished setting it down. He produced a pen, seemingly from nowhere, and buried himself in the half-finished crossword, ignoring the silence that followed his question.

Mansell was back before anyone answered, as if he had run the distance, irritated hands curling into fists at his sides.

"There's no one there," he reported, voice sallow. "No one answered the doors, and they were locked when I tried them."

For a moment, Miles considered fetching the car keys from his room and just driving back to Whitechapel. Back to Judy and the kids, and the ghosts lurking in the recesses of the station.

Perhaps Thornton had had a similar idea, he thought, standing and moving to the window. He leant as close to the pane as he could without his breath fogging the image, and peered out into the damp.

"Anyone remember if they had a car parked out there?"

Riley moved to join him, her reflection as hollow-eyed as if sleep had been burrowing there in a failed attempt to make it into her head.

"I don't know about them," she said, fingers moving to pick over the edge of her plaster. "But we certainly did."

"What do you mean?" Chandler demanded, head lifting, showing more interest in this than he had in anything since they had lost their last murderers. Mansell jostled at Riley, trying to see out of the window, and she swatted his arm.

"Our car's gone," Miles confirmed, struggling to see deeper into the grey beyond the pane, as if that would show him that he was wrong, that it was parked just out of sight and that nothing was awry.

"Stealing patrons' cars can't be a part of standard operating procedure here, can it?" Buchan's voice had a nervous twist to it, and Miles' head crackled with resentment in response. "Joe?"

"Thornton did say that they weren't conventional," Kent offered, reported speech with no self or opinion behind it.

"Maybe they just moved it somewhere more out of the rain," Mansell suggested. "No one's actually going to steal a car from a house full of police detectives."

_They would have to have taken the keys from my room_, Miles realised, but Chandler was talking before he could air the thought, sounding irritatingly and unflappably calm. As if all of his negative emotions had been shredded out of him, a torrent of red, in the past few days.

"We should wait for them to come back," their DI informed them. "If they don't, we can find the landline and use it to call someone. In the meantime, I'm sure we could all do with breakfast."

He said nothing about who was going to make this breakfast that no one was going to feel like eating. Eventually, they all ended up picking at the tasteless cereal that Mansell found in one of the kitchen cupboards, like a roomful of sparrows. Miles did his best not to let the others see his eyes keep straying back to his watch, and he tried not to be aware of them doing the same.

"How long do you reckon they'll be?" Mansell asked finally, trepidation stalking around the edges of his features.

"Thornton said it was a long way to the nearest town," Kent pointed out, but his voice was uneasy, and he seemed to be drowning his spoon in milk rather than actually eating with it.

"He's trapped us here," Buchan declared, wild eyes staring at the table in front of him as if it were made of knives. "The landline probably doesn't even exist."

"Shut up," Mansell snapped indelicately, but there was something wrong in his face; he had already had the same idea as the historian. Miles supposed that they all had. Worst case scenarios weren't exactly difficult to think of any longer.

"If we need to, we can break open that box to get at our phones," Riley said. She sounded reasonable, but the edges of the plaster on her hand were ragged, the legacy of her anxious fussing at it.

Miles glanced down before he could pick out any more signs of how frayed the people in his team had become. For a moment, he wanted to go and check, go and make sure that the box was still there, but he didn't. If he didn't, it would be impossible to find it gone.

The silence came back, and trapped them in the room just as the locks trapped them in the house. None of them could leave while their ears strained to hear the sound of tyres slogging through the wet, lest the cacophony their feet on the floorboards drown it out.

Waiting became unbearable before the hour was out. Thornton and Pauline weren't coming back. Miles knew that the way that people knew the doorbell would ring the instant before it did, knew who was on the other end of the phone before they answered.

"I promised my husband I'd call," Riley said finally, hushed, as if it hadn't been something she had wanted to share with the room, just a memory that had risen slowly to the surface and bubbled from her mouth. "He'll worry."

"I'll help you look for the landline," Buchan offered immediately, speech spiked and intimidated.

"Try not to break anything," Miles ordered, more at the historian than at Riley, though she was the one who smiled her acknowledgement at him.

They left without saying anything further, and for a moment, with the grey crowding at the windows and the shadows huddling in the hall, Miles believed that there was no other place in existence. Just this room, with its six small occupants, four now that Riley and Buchan had stepped out into a harsh, hungry nothingness and let it swallow them whole.

Then he heard their feet on the stair, and the instant was gone.

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><p><em>AN - _So, good news! Or bad news, depending upon whether or not you actually like this fic. But, since this is the fourth chapter, I reckon I'm relatively safe to say it's good news. While I was procrastinating the other day, I worked out how long it would take for this fic to be up in its entirety if I continued uploading only once a week (and it's quite a long time). So despite the fact that I am currently six thousand words behind on my NaNo, writing the sequel to this fic and plotting the sequel to that, I'm going to attempt to update three times per week. So, the next chapter should be up at some stage on Tuesday. Thanks to everyone for reading! ^.^


	5. Chapter 5

The house had eyes. Buchan saw them every time his own lost focus, glaring out of the table, the stairs, the windows. Struggling to sleep the night before, the whorls on his ceiling had taken on the aspect of Oliver Diggory's face, and he had stared back at it until dawn had granted him his freedom. In daylight, it was possible to believe that it wasn't about to move.

He had hoped that their all becoming veritable prisoners might have distracted him enough that he wouldn't feel the walls watching him, a small positive to take away. It had only made the feeling worse, the letters on the crossword he had tried to finish blotting against his eyes, rather than registering into anything that made sense.

"Where do you think we should start?"

Buchan started at Riley's question, and cursed himself for that. He was supposed to be better, he _had_ been feeling better. Not afraid anymore. But then they had been sent out here, sent out here to step into the maw of the house. Never again to walk anywhere but past its teeth, deeper down its throat.

"The landline," Riley clarified, turning her head to glance at him, concern making ponderous progress across her face. "You all right, Ed?"

"I'm fine," he declared instantly, moving on from his own welfare as quickly as he could. Before she could spot the lie. "The landline – well, Mansell didn't find it in the kitchen, and there's no sign of it in the dining room, so..."

Riley kept watching him, as if his hastily prepared answer had gone about as deep into her mind as the crossword had gone into his.

"I'm fine," he repeated, gaze dropping. "I just didn't sleep very well."

"Me neither," she offered. She turned away from him, as if accepting that there would be no further conversation on that front. Buchan half-regretted that. He couldn't articulate it, but he wanted – _needed_ – her help. "I would have thought they would keep the phone in the hall…"

There was no phone in the hall. There was _nothing_ in the hall, except a few empty pegs for coats, and a carpet to provide a forest for the spiders that lurked around the skirting board. No phone and no table to house it, just a flat emptiness from door until stairs.

"There's not going to be a landline, is there?" Buchan asked her, because there was no point in trying to rid his mind of the fear that had lodged itself there like a monumental tick. Not if it was going to be proven well-founded.

"We just need to keep looking," Riley said, her voice as upbeat as an acrophobic trying to pretend that they weren't standing on the edge of a cliff. She glanced into the utility room, but saw nothing worthy of either mention or further inspection. "Try upstairs."

Buchan didn't see much point in that. There was no phone in his room, and he was sure that the others would have mentioned it if they had found one in theirs. But he did as she said anyway, the wail of wood resulting from his feet hitting the stairs ratcheting painfully against his skull.

"Maybe in Thornton or Pauline's rooms," he suggested, though precious little good it would do them there, when Mansell had already found those doors locked.

Riley didn't reply, and her footsteps didn't follow him upwards. Buchan glanced back down into the hall, and saw her motionless shape staring at the shelf which should have held the box of phones.

Buchan went to join her, the dread coalescing into his mind and convincing him that he felt the stairs give under his weight. The idea fired a panic through his synapses that wasn't gone by the time he reached her.

Where the box had been, there was nothing but a rectangle of dust-free surface, the gleam of the polished wood a mockery of chestnut brown.

"No," Riley said quietly, her fingers rubbing at her plaster. "There's not going to be a landline."

Having it confirmed was somehow even worse than just knowing that he was right. The few meagre bites of cereal that he had managed to swallow started to twist in his stomach, as if they had been made of magnesium.

"We should tell the others," Riley informed him, in much the same way as a person talks to a soft toy. He supposed that he had about the same potential for speech for the next few minutes.

As she turned back into the dining room, he trailed after her all the same. There was nowhere else to go.

It looked as if nothing had been said in their absence. Mansell was absently shuffling a deck of cards, but he didn't look as if he were about to decide on a game. The others were sitting in their various separate states of silence.

"There's no landline that we can find," Riley announced. She paused afterwards, though what for, Buchan wasn't sure. None of her audience were displaying any signs of shock, though Miles' jaw had tightened, his eyes on Buchan as if the historian had personally taken the phone and thrown it from the highest window in the house.

"The box of our mobiles is gone, too," he added, and now there was a reaction. Mansell's hands stuttered, the black joker twisting from the pack and landing face-down on the carpet. There was a murmur of curse words, fading into a more empty silence.

"What do we do?"

Buchan was so keen to hear the answer that he wasn't quite sure who had asked the question. He glanced, like the rest of the team, toward Chandler, and toward Miles, as if hoping that their superior officers had some insight that they had missed.

"I don't think there's anything much that we _can_ do," Chandler pointed out, though his sergeant's stance shifted, as if he would have preferred they do fruitless press-ups on the floor. Just so that they would be doing _something_. "They've taken the car, and they've taken our phones."

"We should leave," Mansell muttered, reaching down to collect the joker, as if that would hide who had spoken. "There'll be a phone in the next town."

"Not in this weather," Riley reminded him, settling into the chair alongside far more calmly than she should have been able to. Perhaps having children made one experienced in the art of hiding one's own distress. "Unless anyone's particularly keen on the idea of pneumonia."

"There's no reason to take any drastic action," Chandler pointed out, though Buchan was fairly certain that Miles, sitting the closest to him, would be able to smell the Tiger Balm that the inspector had been applying. "As far as we know, this might just be part of their team building exercise."

"Bloody odd if it is," Miles muttered, but Buchan chose to ignore his remark in favour of chasing after the hope which Chandler's statement had offered, a moth in a firestorm of negativity.

No one spoke on the subject again, as if they were afraid that if they examined the inspector's idea too closely, they might begin to find flaws. Cracks, which would be showing deeper on their faces before the day was any older.

"Deal them out, then," Riley prompted Mansell, shoving at him with her elbow. He did as he was told, automatically dividing the deck between the DCs, though Kent had been so still that Buchan suspected that if someone nudged him, he would fall sideways, revealing himself to be nothing but a life-size puppet, his eyes glass. The others didn't look much better. And Buchan suspected that any mirrored surface would show that he was among the worst of them.

The silence came back, haunting them, brushing aside the soft shifting of the playing cards, and Buchan could feel them all drowning in it, unable to keep their heads above water.

* * *

><p><em>AN_ - Thank you, as ever, for your support. ^.^ I should be uploading the next chapter on Friday.


	6. Chapter 6

There were too many knives. _Not enough forks_, Riley corrected herself, but where her eyes glanced into the cutlery drawer, they stayed on the cluster of glinting silver blades. The tapering delicacy of their points only served to direct her gaze toward the sharper ones lurking at the back. Her tired mind watched the play of the light against their edges, fascinated by the keen slices of dazzling that scratched against her aching head. They were beautiful. Their possibilities, everything that she had seen in her career as a detective, were odd, abstract things, as distant as a house fire from a lit match.

Too many knives. They overflowed their designated section, one of them slipping over to invade the realm of the spoons. So many that they couldn't possibly all have been used for eating.

"Riley!"

Miles' shout brought her up like a gunshot. She grabbed at the potato peelers, turned in time to nearly crash into Mansell as he worried over the mince, and swore. They ought to recommend cookery as an activity for other centres, in that they were now all more likely to strangle one another than they had been all day. That seemed to be what team building was all about.

She thrust one of the peelers at Kent, and he took it quietly. So quietly that she almost expected him to look at it as if he had never seen one before. Instead, he started on a potato, working quickly. The skin sheared away easily, and Riley bit at her own tongue, reminded suddenly of Llewellyn's autopsy room.

"Keep stirring!"

Miles had taken the duty of overseer, and seemed even more short-tempered than usual. The first few times that he had snapped, she had flinched with the shock of it. No more, her ears dulled to his ire, as long as Mansell was its target.

"It'll stick," the sergeant added by way of explanation, his words spat thorns, as he moved closer to the hob. "Have you never made a shepherd's pie before?"

Riley glanced over at Kent, a laugh ready in her throat, but he didn't even glance around, dragging the peeler across his third potato, and she let it dissipate.

It wasn't the sort of thing that she wanted to smile about on her own.

"Are you all right, Emerson?" she found herself asking quietly, letting the conversation between Miles and Mansell fade into background noise. Then, she wished that she hadn't, because it was fairly obvious that there was something wrong with him. Her head was too full of the absence of her sleeping for her to know what to say about his problems.

He nodded, and she hated how grateful she was when he didn't go into any more depth.

"You?"

"Looking forward to getting home." And unless she said something else, the conversation was going to go down like the R101. "I never thought I'd miss the weather in Whitechapel."

It was clear from his lack of an answer that he wanted to be having this conversation about as much as she did. Or perhaps he just didn't see any need for him to say anything.

"Have you two finished with those potatoes yet?" Miles' voice had the cadence of the jaws of a bear trap closing. The words were more like those of an art teacher who believed that somehow talking and drawing could not occur simultaneously.

Kent flinched at the sudden intrusion behind them, his potato peeler swerving dangerously close to his thumb. Riley watched for a second, wondering if there would be blood, but he controlled himself, a swallow twisting under the skin of his throat.

"Nearly, Skip," he said without looking up, as if the vegetable held as much allure for him as the knives had done for her. Miles' silence felt pointed, and Riley did her best to ignore a rush of heat through her temples.

Mansell managed to do something else wrong before she could snap at him, yelping at an angry spitting sound from the hob. Miles turned on his heel and marched away, grumbling about how his kids were better at cooking a meal than his detectives, and they needed parental supervision to use the oven.

The next potato found its way into the sink with rather more force than necessary. The water splashed up over Riley's sleeve, slapping against the plaster, and she gritted her teeth. Reached for the towel, only to find that it had been moved from its hook. It seemed to end up in a different place every time someone used it, and each time, the irritation inside Riley's head swelled a little more.

Mansell, seeing her predicament, pulled it off the front of the oven and offered it to her. She pulled it from his grasp with a noise that might once have encountered a _thanks_. She doubted it. The only thing that she could think of which would warrant real thanks would be the offer of a lift back to Whitechapel, back to her husband and her kids and her life.

Her family. In an ideal world, she supposed, she should have considered her colleagues a family too. And at times, she had. Not now. Now, all she saw were the spaces inserted between them, only ever breached by the teeth in their words and the fists that they used for striking at one another. The spaces which made her miss her home more, until she could hardly breathe for being away. Perhaps, on the other side of all that distance, they would be feeling the same for her. Her kids were upset enough when she worked a long shift. God only knew how her husband was going to console them when she couldn't even give them a _phone call._

When she looked around, saw Buchan or Mansell or Kent or Miles or Chandler, what she found herself really seeing was the absence of family, as if the detectives had stolen away her children in the night and then tried to move into their spaces.

It felt like every time she looked at them, she hated them a little for who they weren't.

* * *

><p>So, the next chapter should be up on Sunday. Thanks for reading. ^.^<p> 


	7. Chapter 7

It was impossible to tell if the face in the knife was distorted because of the metal's shape, or if it was something else. Kent did his best to hide it inside the food anyway. Food with flavours far too violent for his stomach, that set it roiling in a way that he doubted was just the effect of Mansell's cooking. But every now and then his eyes would snag on their own reflection and watch it with the same fascinated horror that an arachnophobe would a spider.

What conversation there was glanced off him without impact, a stream parting around a rock. He should have been able to listen, but the words were nothing but sounds twisting between one another. All he could really hear were the distant creakings in the floor over their heads, as if above them something was shuffling. The occasional dull thud like a match being struck.

_Houses make noises_, he told himself, when his mind dragged enough awareness together to form words in his thoughts. But so, of course, did things within houses, and no amount of believing the former would keep away the shadows beyond their table if they chose to come closer.

Kent shovelled another forkful of shepherd's pie into his mouth and chewed unenthusiastically, his throat struggling to close.

The conversation ceased, and he looked up enough to establish that they weren't all waiting for him to say something. Chandler was at the meeting point of the others' stares, and the ripple of his words managed to reach up over the rock of unawareness that was Kent's consciousness.

"Panicking isn't going to do us any good," he said, though it didn't seem as if any of them were doing so. Panic had died in the first few hours of their imprisonment, and its corpse had been eaten by the slow crawling weight of dread. "We've got plenty of food, and if the weather clears before Thornton comes back, we might be able to make it to the next town."

The same conversations. Over and over and over and over and over and over again. As if repeating this particular experiment would eventually provide them with a different result. Or perhaps it was something else, like painting over the rotting timbers of a house to try and give it an intact façade. An attempt to reassure themselves that there was a way out.

It might be better if the house _were_ rotting, Kent thought, hunching his shoulders away from the walls. His aunt would have said it was a place touched by bad spirits, and the way that their faces ached with the lack of their smiles, in that moment he would have been inclined to agree with her. Every expression other than frowning had been shredded away. They had been miserable before they had arrived, of course they had, but not like this. Like this, where Mansell hadn't said anything irritating in over a day and the skipper was behaving like a dog in the early stages of rabies.

Like this, where every now and then, his spine straightened with the same feeling that he had had just before the incident room had been burgled.

The rest of their conversation passed him by as if he had never been able to hear it, and Mansell was the first to leave the table. Going to look for their phones, he said, and though his tone was flat, Kent could see the frantic edge beneath it in the way he tried to walk too slowly from the room.

He found himself standing up not long after, on a search for a quiet that he'd regret once he found it, and no one stopped him from leaving. The noise of the stairs shattered its way into his brain and lodged there. It sounded as if the steps were breaking away behind him, leaving him with no way back.

His door opened with a momentary flash of light that made him scrunch his eyes shut. By the time he could open them again, he was inside.

The room had been filled with mirrors. Mirrors of all shapes and sizes, on the walls, the ceiling, the door, _everywhere_. The brightness of it all dug into his eyes like an icepick, but it wasn't enough to obscure the fact that his reflection had stepped into the room with him, rictus-snarling, the lines of the skull far too obvious beneath the flesh.

Kent took a step backwards, but the door had closed behind him, and it seemed that the reflections had moved closer, all those smiles carving deeper. Waiting for his face to match theirs.

His hand snatched for the door handle, but slipped off it, unable to get a grip. He wanted to turn his head, guide his fingers with his eyes, but he couldn't look away from his faces in the mirrors. His head whipped from side to side as if something were about to rush at him from the dark, trying to keep all of them in view. The blood in his throat pulsed so violently that he could almost hear it, see it, his vision thudding.

Across the room, a full-length mirror had him in red up to his elbows, dripping from his nails like a knife-edge, and he redoubled his efforts, though his frantic fingers could no longer find the doorknob.

_It's not me_, he told himself, thoughts so spiked with panic that conviction fell straight off them. It was a mirror, they were all mirrors, so how could it _not_ be him? It had his eyes, his hands, had the scratch on the side of his head where Mansell had hit him, had all of it. And it was exactly what Morgan Lamb had said he was. Because she had been right, had been right about all of it, what had happened with Mansell _proved_ it. All the mirrors did was show him who he was, who he had always been.

The door finally gave in to his struggles, crashing into his shoulders as he wrenched it inward, and Kent fled.

* * *

><p><em>AN _ - So, thanks for reading a chapter which has more overs than the Ashes. If you did. If you didn't, I don't know what you're doing down here. But thanks very much for the support. ^.^ The next chapter might be up on Tuesday, lectures are happening again next week so I don't know if there'll be time, I don't see why there wouldn't be, but well. It will be up on Tuesday, or it won't be.


	8. Chapter 8

The morning shadows were indistinct across the table, their darkness without an edge. Chandler, the first downstairs again, did his best not to watch them, to see if the sun rose and made them shift. There had been too much waiting for things to happen, things that never would happen. And with every expecting second that passed, their own lack of choices forced them to see how helpless they were.

There was no paper to examine, this time, the stories from the last one almost lodged verbatim in his head. Instead, he gazed at his tea as it twisted in the wake of his spoon, the dull whirling hypnotising troubling thoughts away to silence.

When the noise of the stairs came, it was almost deafening. Chandler started, his drink slapping against the side of the mug, dangerously close to the rim. Despite the tired ache dissolving his skull at the eye sockets, he did his best to glance up, to look as a detective inspector should. He didn't want any of them to see the cracks that they probably already knew were there.

Only Miles, moving slowly, looking down. He seemed just as exhausted as Chandler felt, but neither of them would mention it. Miles wouldn't say that his boss looked like something a dog had fished out of a canal if the description was something that Chandler could turn right back on him.

"Morning," he said.

Miles grunted in response, and walked into the kitchen without expanding on it. The next noise was the cupboard doors opening and closing, and Chandler tuned it out, turning his attention back to his tea.

When he looked up again, Mansell and Riley were there, sitting in mutual silence over twin bowls of cereal, and, in the kitchen, someone was clattering loudly about. Miles had returned, curling his lip in disdain over his slice of toast as if it had said something to offend him.

"Has there been any sign of Thornton today?"

The voice came from the doorway, where Buchan was standing, a mug clutched in one hand and a hopeful expression smoothing his features. He was responsible for the previous racket, then. It wasn't really surprising.

Chandler shook his head, unwilling to dredge up enough mind to speak and have to pretend that it wasn't a problem. The historian's face fell, and he vanished back into the kitchen. Chandler glanced down again, only to realise that he had completely run out of tea.

"Soon, we'll be overdue," Riley offered, as if she couldn't stand to sit through the silence any longer. "They'll try to get in contact with us here. My husband's probably worrying already. I told him I'd phone."

"Maybe they'll send someone out," Mansell muttered, his head lifting as he warmed to the idea. It was a welcoming thought against the backdrop of the dour Welsh weather.

"Speaking of being overdue," Miles growled, giving his watch a pointed glare which made the toast seem lucky to have got off with so little. "Where's Kent?"

Riley's eyes turned the question to Mansell, meeting his gaze as he did exactly the same to her. They watched one another for a moment, as if silently arguing over whose responsibility Kent had been, before Mansell shrugged.

"We assumed he'd already be here," he said, glancing up at the ceiling as if his stare would wake the other DC.

"We didn't see him on our way down," Riley added, somewhat gratuitously.

Chandler considered the information as logically as he could, doing his best to ignore the shrivelling feeling beneath his sternum. He hadn't heard anything from the room next to his, but then, he didn't think he had at any stage. The only thing he _had_ heard were people on the stairs.

"Maybe he overslept," Buchan suggested, appearing in the doorway again after apparently having listened in on most of the conversation. "None of us are sleeping well."

"I'll go and knock on his door," Riley said, her body hunching over as she half-stood, still trying to wolf down a few more spoonfuls of cereal.

"No," Chandler interrupted, standing. Better that he went, the only one not in the middle of a meal. He doubted he would have been able to stomach one had he tried. "I'll go."

He did his best not to see the significant glance that his DCs exchanged on his way past.

The groaning of the stairs was almost physically painful, and he grimaced, wondering how it was possible that Kent had managed to sleep through all of them climbing down. A few short strides to the right door, and he rapped his knuckles against it. It swung inward under the impact, silent against its hinges.

"Kent?" he called hesitantly, unwilling to push it any further.

There was no answer. Chandler counted to thirty before he knocked again, the quiet stiffening his spine.

"Kent?"

Still nothing, and he took that as an invitation to open the door completely, the movement slow to stop it becoming frantic. Slow, because he was hoping for something to stop him in his tracks, every second stretching with a need for an answer that never came.

The bed was made, almost as neatly as if it had never been slept in. Kent's bags were lying at the end of it, barely disturbed, and there was still no sign of their owner, the room nothing but a useless, sweeping emptiness.

"_DC Kent_," Chandler tried, raising his voice a little and hating the way the strain showed through. He gave his surroundings another cursory glance, but there was nothing to indicate any sort of incident.

He made his way back out into the hall, but there was nothing there except the turnings to more places where Kent wouldn't be.

He descended, and the eyes of his colleagues all turned hopefully towards his entrance, before scudding back down toward the ground at the sight of his expression.

"He's not there," Chandler informed them, his voice kept carefully flat. This news, on top of everything else, could cause them to panic properly, losing what little fragile cohesion remained between them.

The silence that followed his words told him that he had a few minutes of shock to work with before fear could get its claws in properly.

"What do you mean, he's not there?" Miles echoed, looking more engaged with this than he had with anything all morning. "Where else could he be?"

As if the sound of his sergeant speaking had opened a floodgate, the voices began to tumble over one another, twisting and turning until he could barely make them out.

"What if," Buchan said hesitantly, and his words cut across the others by the sheer sense of doom in them, the rest of the team quieting to hear. "What if there's someone else in here with us? As in the Sly Driscoll affair. It's an old house; there have to be lots of spaces in the walls, between floors, and they could be living in one of the empty rooms. What if someone's picking us off, one by one?"

Which, Chandler decided, was probably the absolute worst thing that he could have said. He could feel the words in his own head, thorns that had stuck there, thorns that no amount of struggling would remove.

"Calm down," he said, mostly because it needed to be said by somebody. The imperative had more conviction than he felt. The image of another person in the walls was far too easy to conjure. And, though he did his best not to entertain the possibility, the idea that Kent was _gone_ threatened to close his throat. He swallowed in an attempt to find control, reaching for his Tiger Balm. "We need to search. Mansell, Riley, take Buchan and check the first floor, then the second. Miles, you're with me. _No one_ goes off on their own. Is that understood?"

"What are we doing?" Miles demanded, not moving even as the others made their slow way to their feet, as if walking through dreaming.

"We're checking this floor, and then we're checking the exits," Chandler informed him, because it wasn't impossible that Kent had decided he could make it to the next town. He preferred it to Buchan's theory.

"I'm not sure he ever left the floor he was on," Buchan said hesitantly, the warning glance that Chandler shot him either ignored or not noticed. "With those stairs, no one can move between floors without someone else hearing. And I'm not sure about anyone else, but I didn't get enough sleep last night that I wouldn't have heard."

Miles muttered something that almost sounded like _not unless the house didn't want us to hear_, and Chandler chose to ignore it.

"If you find him," he said to the retreating backs of his DCs and his historian. "Bring him down here, don't send someone to come and get us."

"Sir," Riley acknowledged, and then they were gone.

Miles sat and regarded him for what felt like half an hour before he spoke.

"What do you think of this, then?" he asked. "Someone in the walls? I doubt things like that happen to a detective more than once in their career."

"We'll see when we find Kent," Chandler said, glancing around the doorway into the kitchen. He didn't expect his missing DC to be in there, not in the few minutes since Buchan had emerged, but it was good to be thorough.

Miles didn't challenge his choice of conjunction, and he was grateful for that. It made him feel as if they were both mutually certain. He turned back to the dining room, and watched his sergeant straightening from having peered under the table. _Being thorough_, Chandler told himself, to keep from snapping.

"He's not in here," Miles reported. "This floor might take less time than you expected."

"If we finish, and the others haven't found him, we can go and have a look around his room," Chandler decided. _But it won't come to that_.

Miles made a non-committal noise and headed in the direction of the hall. "So, what did it look like in there? Any signs of a struggle?"

"No," Chandler said, shaking his head as he followed his sergeant. "It looked like he hadn't slept in his bed in the night."

"So, he might have been gone last night?"

"Maybe." Chandler sighed. "Or maybe he just didn't sleep. It seems that there's a lot of that going around."

"Not here, either," Miles announced, and Chandler winced. Each confirmation of a place where Kent wasn't somehow felt as if it were making it less and less likely that he would be anywhere. "Do you want to look at the front door while I try the utility room?"

"We don't separate," Chandler reminded him, and Miles turned his head so that he could see the raising of his sergeant's eyebrows.

"We'd hardly be in different continents," Miles muttered.

"Nevertheless." Chandler paused, his fingers reaching for a rubber band that hadn't been there in far too long. "Kent was in the room right next to mine, Miles."

Miles made another noise, this one hopefully a concession of the point. He stepped into the porch and tried the outer door with one hand. Then he tried it with both hands.

"Locked," he concluded, succinctly, turning back toward Chandler. "Just like it's been since Thornton left. And there aren't any signs that it's been tampered with. The windows are shut, too, so he's still in the building."

"Just one last room, then," Chandler concluded, stepping sideways to lead Miles into their final chance. A row of washing machines gaped at him, and he did his best to ignore them. He had never been in a utility room as large as this – usually all they needed was space for washer and dryer. But this one seemed to have far too much empty space at the end of it, beyond the devices. He headed for it, and the floor beneath his feet growled a protest as of trying to warn him off.

"Doesn't look like he's in here, either," Miles commented from behind him, but Chandler held up a hand.

"Wait," he said, nudging aside a ratty carpet with one shoe. Beneath it, the floor was deeply scarred by a single regular line.

"Trapdoor," he announced, pushing the rest of the rug aside to reveal a metal ring at the edge.

"You think Kent might be down there?" Miles asked, doubtfully.

"We need to check it whatever I think," Chandler informed him, tugging at the door.

It swung open easily, without a squeak of hinges. Odd, he decided, given the state of disrepair that the stairs were in. The space below was a great cavernous maw, yawning so that he could see its teeth, and he peered into its darkness, struggling to see in the meagre light that the utility room bulb offered.

"What's down there?" Miles demanded, and he squinted.

"Not a lot, by the looks of it," Chandler replied. He shifted, placing one tentative foot on the first step and testing it for rot. It didn't move, didn't make a sound, and he moved again, climbing down into the dark and fighting the panic swelling in his throat. He tried not to think about the last time that he had been _down_, but the memory knew its power and it dug tenacious claws into his brain.

He held his breath, trying to convince himself that he was in control of it. Tried to reach for stillness and calm, only for his arm to twitch spasmodically, to remind him that he didn't have any power over anything.

His eyes narrowed into the black, and slowly, it turned into different shades. Behind him, he heard the first thud of Miles' feet on the steps as his sergeant followed.

"What do you see?" the older man asked. "Any sign of Kent?"

"I'm not sure." Chandler struggled to make sense of the blurred shapes, and slowly they resolved themselves. The edge of a wall, the start of the floor, maybe a pipe. Closer than that, and the breath froze into needles in his neck at the sight of a sad huddle of a shape, like someone curled on their side, fetal. "Miles!" He jerked his head toward it, because his voice was twisting with a fear that he didn't want heard.

His eyes were riveted to the body, waiting for it to shift, struggling to convince himself that it would, but the rest of his mind laughed at that, because nothing that meant anything to him ever survived. He couldn't move, but Miles was already stepping past him, though in the room above, the bulb was starting to flicker, casting the room into a weak strobe, the floor snarling.

"Miles," he said again, but that was all he managed before he was cut off by a sound like tortured metal. He glanced around in time to see the trapdoor slam, and then nothing but the dark.

* * *

><p><em>AN - _So, this is up a bit later than I had hoped - turned out there was more work for tomorrow than I had thought, and I am now officially behind on my NaNo. And it turned out that I _really_ didn't like my draft for this chapter and half the thing needed to be reworked. It is a bit longer than usual, though, if that helps. But anyway. Hopefully, I'll have the next chapter up for Friday. In the meantime, thanks very much for reading and for your kind reviews! ^.^


	9. Chapter 9

Mansell was walking close enough to Riley that their shoulders crashed together every few seconds, and even he could barely hear what she was saying. It seemed as if the stairs had grown louder, the thunder-rush of a storm-sea which had risen to drag them all away.

"I just don't see how he could be anywhere but on this floor," Riley half-shouted, wincing as her movement caused a sound like nails down a blackboard. "Just listen to that."

Waiting for Buchan's inevitable doom-filled proclamation, Mansell almost missed a step and barely saved himself from falling upwards onto the first landing. Whatever prophecy of destruction was brewing in the historian's head stayed there, unusually, and he was grateful for that.

"Where should we start?" he asked, because they wouldn't find Kent if all they did was spout various theories about how he could possibly have gone missing. And once they found him, he would be able to tell them.

"Kent's room," Riley decided, offering them both a grim smile. "Might be something that the boss didn't see. Hopefully Kent."

A few more seconds, and that hope was dashed on the rocks like a rowing boat in a tsunami. In Mansell's opinion, there had never been a room as empty of evidence, in the history of both rooms and evidence, as this one. Maybe Buchan could have confirmed it.

"Looks like he only moved in five minutes ago," he muttered disgustedly. His own room was a mess, though Kent's was more empty than _tidy_. He glanced through the door into the bathroom, and found a lack of either Kent or anything that might be useful in finding him. It was too bright in there to be so useless, the white-clean porcelain of everything gleaming in the mirror and striking up the beginnings of a headache in the back of his skull.

Mansell turned back into the main room in time to see Buchan straightening from checking under the bed, and resisted the impulse to snap.

"He doesn't appear to be here," the historian announced, voice the same timbre as that of a tour guide. "Shall we move on?"

Mansell led the way out, glancing at Riley and wondering if he should offer her some sort of raised-eyebrow-and-smirk combination at the prospect of looking for Kent in the boss' room. After all, acting as if everything was normal might make the situation feel a little better, somehow.

She was looking past him, and then the door handle was turning under his hand and it was too late.

There was no sign there, anyway. And Mansell could feel the fear starting to stir, fear that felt like the empty space at McCormack's desk.

Across the hallway, Buchan's room. The historian had brought more books than could possibly be healthy, but there was no sign, and he could see the slump he could feel in his own shoulders sloping into the others'. The creases etching deeper into their foreheads with each place they found empty.

"Erica's going to kill me," Mansell found himself muttering as they turned towards the last door, breathing out hard through his nose.

"Not if whatever took DC Kent gets you first," Buchan said, his eyes as wide as if all the lights had been switched off. Mansell doubted that he had meant it to be comforting.

"Shut up," Mansell snapped, knocking on the skipper's door with a little more force than necessary. He could feel Riley's gaze on him, questioning. He hadn't knocked on the others, he knew, but somehow he hoped that if he did something differently, the end result would be different, too. "Kent!"

There was no answer, and the silence stretched as if on a rack. But Mansell, immobilised by his need for a response, couldn't move to break free of the waiting, and it was Riley who shoved past him to open the door.

Mansell trailed after her, his eyes on the ground. He knew what they would find, but the stupid desperate hope inside his head fluttered anyway, a moth, and he if he looked up and confirmed the nothing that he knew was there, it would be as if it had flown into an open flame.

No one said that there was no sign, but he could tell it from the tone of the silence. He tried to turn his listening downwards, deciding that Chandler and Miles were about to call up that they had found Kent. He imagined the way that their voices would sound, muffled but audible, the noise of their feet on the stairs as they rushed down, steps lighter than before.

It had to be imagined, because he wasn't about to hear it.

"To the next floor, then?" Buchan said softly, breaking the quiet into shards. "We have two more to go, after all."

_Two more_, Mansell repeated to himself. Kent would be on one of them, and he would be alive. Riley would hug him, and then she would slap him upside the head for worrying them. He would act like he'd never even been concerned, and the boss wouldn't have that frantic look in his eyes any longer.

The sound of Riley's feet on the stairs shattered his illusion, and he had to force himself to move through the real world again.

"We would have heard him," she repeated, almost to herself. "There's no way we wouldn't have."

"It's like he just vanished into thin air," the historian said hesitantly, offering her a mournful glance. "Even with someone in the walls, there would surely have been signs of a struggle. There would have been something."

"We'll find him," Mansell said, because one of them needed to keep saying it. "And he'll be fine."

"If he was fine, don't you think that he would have come to find us and tell us that himself?" Buchan retorted, the tone of his voice suggesting that he hated the holes he was picking, but felt that they needed to be picked. "I'm not trying to be the voice of doom –"

_Really?_ Mansell thought. _But you're so good at it._

"– but someone needs to say it."

They turned onto the second floor, and Mansell strode ahead to open his door, then wasn't sure what to do with the extra time. Perhaps he had assumed that the ten seconds before Riley and Buchan joined him would be sufficient to tidy his room into something vaguely acceptable.

It wasn't.

"How did you manage to do this, when we've only been here three days?" Riley enquired, and he wondered if he should shoot her a glare and mutter something about there being a time and a place for a commentary on his lack of cleanliness.

"It's not so bad," he retorted instead, because the anxious pull to her face knew exactly what was happening. "You can see the floor." _But not Kent. Not Kent, because he's not here. He isn't anywhere._

"As much as it would be scientifically interesting to stay here and study what is no-doubt a thriving colony of bacteria," Buchan said, hovering in the doorway as if he wasn't quite brave enough to step inside. "Should we check the next room?"

"You mean, my room?" Riley muttered, and Mansell would have given her a significant glance, if Kent hadn't been missing.

All the same, he was grateful to shut his own door behind him. As the others headed over to her room, he found himself looking across the hall, and wondering how many other places they had to search, given that the doors across from them were locked.

He was still wondering, trying to hide from the answer that his mind had found, when Riley and Buchan left her room, and Buchan immediately hurried over to the first of the unoccupied ones. Mansell opened his mouth to stop the historian from wasting his time.

"That's – "

The handle turned under Buchan's hand and the door opened inward.

"– locked," Mansell finished, exchanging confused glances with Riley.

"Aren't you going to join me?" Buchan called from inside the unoccupied room.

Mansell and Riley tried to go through the door simultaneously, and their shoulders impacted, Mansell stumbling off sideways as she overtook him and then hurrying after her.

Mansell didn't know what he'd been expecting. The room was almost completely empty – it made Kent's look as bad as his. No sheets on the bed, no one _under_ the bed, just a room with the minimum fittings and barely any dust.

"I could have sworn they were both locked," Mansell said, and Riley nodded, looking more than a little disconcerted.

"Why would anyone have unlocked the doors?" she demanded, as Buchan checked the bathroom.

"I think the question is _who unlocked the doors_," Mansell told her, and her face twisted, troubled.

"I didn't think there was anyone else here," Buchan said, emerging from the bathroom. "Other than us. Maybe you just turned the handles the wrong way?"

"Maybe," Riley said, but she didn't sound convinced. Mansell supposed that they could talk about that after they had found Kent. Maybe their absent colleague would have some answers.

"He's not here," Mansell pointed out, unable to think of it as one room closer to the one where he was any longer. Not when it felt like there was suddenly a possibility for him to be in none of them. "Next room."

They were out in the hall, pausing for Buchan to shut the door behind them, when he heard it. A clattering from the floor above, like dominoes falling, followed by a wave-break crash.

"Did you hear _that_?" Riley asked, a frown twisting her face.

Mansell was running almost before his brain had computed the positive answer for her, the stairs shrieking at his passing, a slam like a car crash snapping against his ears as his feet hit the upper landing. He barely heard Riley and Buchan shouting after him amongst the noise, but he didn't look back, there wasn't _time_ for him to look back. Not when one of the doors along the hall was slightly ajar, promises leaking out like the end of Pandora's Box. He ran for it, half-expecting it to slam shut and lock in front of his eyes, hope shuddering in his throat, a desperate excitement that wouldn't let him breathe, no matter how much he knew that he needed to.

Even with his sprint, it felt as if he would never reach the door. It was too far away and far too important.

Then his hand grazed at the whorled wood of the its panels, and he shoved it wide.

The room beyond was almost completely empty. No furniture, just a wooden floor scarred as if by acne. And, curled on the far side with his back to the door, Detective Constable Emerson Kent.

* * *

><p><em>AN_ - So, I did mean to get this one up on Friday, but in my defence I had new Friday lectures and failed to time-manage. If it helps, I am also about ten thousand words behind on my NaNo. I don't know why it would help, but there we go. I'll try and put the next one up before the end of the day because otherwise I'll owe you a chapter and my schedule will get confusing.


	10. Chapter 10

"Mansell!"

Riley's shout glanced uselessly off the slab of wood that had fallen down between them and the next floor. Between them and Mansell. There was no reply, and she slammed one fist into the underside of the trapdoor, her knuckles stinging with the savagery of her strike, though the only response from the obstruction was a dull thud.

"Mansell!" she yelled again, shaking off Buchan's hand as it found its way to her arm. It returned itself, insistent, and she turned her head to glare at him. "We need to get this open."

He shook his head vehemently, though his hands were still shaking with the suddenness of the trapdoor's descent. Riley could still hear the echoing of its crash in her head.

"We should go back down and tell the others," Buchan said, voice frightened but reasonable, and she could feel herself calming. "I doubt we'll be able to open this on our own, they'll be able to help us."

Riley hesitated, glancing towards where she had lost sight of Mansell. "Ed, he's on his own up there. The boss said we shouldn't split up."

"That floor," Buchan said, pointing upwards. "By process of elimination, is the floor where young Kent is. He's not on his own, and we've no reason to think that he's hurt, but Joe still needs to know what happened."

Riley gave the trapdoor above them one last glance. She could see the sense in what Buchan was saying, but the idea of leaving Mansell made her teeth ache, and her feet dragged with the weight of it when she turned.

"Fine," she said, her heels kicking against the steps as she turned back down the stair. "Let's go, we can be back up here in –"

"Meg!" Buchan grabbed her arm again, yanking her back so hard that her head impacted with the ground in a crack of white sound. She turned her head to snap at him, but was cut off by a noise louder than a gunshot. Another trapdoor slammed across the way down, so quickly that it could have taken her feet off if she had kept going.

Riley breathed out hard, and tried to ignore the rushing through her head that told her she should never have stayed a detective. It was louder than it had been since the death of Crispin Wingfield, and it took her a moment to steady herself, rubbing at her head.

As if her movement had shocked him from his own frozen-rabbit panic, Buchan darted forward, scrabbling at the edge of the trapdoor. He didn't seem to notice his nails tearing as he clawed and clawed, the obstruction refusing even the slightest movement.

"Help me," he pleaded, his eyes wide and desperate. "We have to open it, we have to get to Joe..." He let his voice trail away, his attention turning back to his task.

Riley moved shakily to his side, gingerly putting her weight on the edge of the trapdoor. It didn't move, more stable than a lot of the paving stones she had walked over. And it wouldn't move, no matter how hard she and Buchan stamped or jumped on it, and they couldn't get enough purchase on the side to drag it upwards.

"We can't move this one," she said, and her voice sounded dead with calm to her own ears as she sat back. "Not on our own."

"We can't give up," Buchan told her, not looking up from the door, words jittering out of his mouth. "Joe!" he yelled, and she could hear the strain. "_Joe_!"

"Skip!" she called, seeing the value in it and adding her voice to his. She stamped as hard as she could on the edge of the door, then shouted again. "Skip!"

Riley wasn't sure how many times she cried out, but her voice turned raw with it, even with them both beating against the wood.

Eventually, she sat away. She tipped her head back into one of the steps and tried not to hear the word _trapped_ as it rattled around her skull, only to feel Buchan's eyes on her, his pupils frantic.

"Why have you stopped?" he demanded. "We have to get back down, we have to, otherwise we'll be trapped on this floor, and we can't –"

"Ed, this one's not going to open," she said, lifting her voice over the shaking of his head. "We can't make it open. It's too heavy."

"Then we try the other one," he declared, springing towards the other end, with all the energy that terror gave. "If we can get Mansell down here, maybe all three of us will be able to open it." He bolstered his shoulder against the upper door and shoved against it, as hard as he could. "Help me!"

Riley did as he said, but it was like trying to lift the top slab off a dolmen. The only result was an ache starting up in her back, each one of her vertebrae launching their own individual complaints.

"It's not working," she told him, in as firm a tone as she could muster. "Ed, we have to try something else."

"There is nothing else," Buchan snapped, his voice so high with panic that there was no sting in it. "Someone must be doing this, we don't know who they are, but they're keeping us here, on this floor. They're keeping us all separate, and the only way that we can get out is through these trapdoors. And we have to get out because this is where they want us to be and we can't stay here, we can't. Please, Meg."

Riley reached for something to say which would reassure him, but there wasn't anything. Not when she could feel her own fear twisting inside her stomach, threatening to explode upwards in words like the plumes of fire from a volcano. Anything she did say would be like pouring oil onto flame.

Into her silence, the noise reached. The slamming. It was the doors furthest from them first, jerking their heads up as if they were on strings. There was enough time for horror to creep over Riley's face, hatefully and inexorably slow, before the others slammed, too, and then came the clicks, the locks turning, though there were no keys. Shutting them out.

A buzzing sound started up in Riley's head, grating against her teeth, and she swallowed in an attempt to disperse it, swaying on her feet for a moment on her way to check the first door.

The static only grew louder, reverberating over the inside of her skull, and she scratched her fingers over her temples as the pressure built.

"Do you hear that?" Buchan asked her, and when she turned her head toward him she could see the noise in the set of his face, almost like nausea.

She nodded, and he turned back to the trapdoor, beating against it with renewed desperation, his fists bouncing ineffectually away, the skin scuffing.

"We need to try these," she shouted, unable to hear the sound of her normal voice over the insidious buzzing, shoving at the first of the doors with her shoulder. "That's not going to give."

He moved to the door opposite and tried the same, with as little success as she had had. The white noise slowly grew louder, building static in her skull. She kicked at the door, but all it did was send judders up her shin, a counterpoint to the pressure in her head.

Their attempts to break through did nothing except increase the noise. Riley rattled the handle in frustration, and then increased her efforts. The sound felt more like a headache now, pulsing steadily towards a migraine, and there was no way of telling where it was coming from. It was everywhere, shaking her bones into instability.

The lights went out. The sudden darkness was almost pale against her eyes for an instant, and she struggled away from panic, trying to ground herself with the cold of the door handle. As she gripped it, the metal suddenly became uncomfortably warm, and then too hot. She couldn't let go, and her eyes rolled back in her head, the static fizzing in bright bursts of colour.

The white noise ceased abruptly, and so did her thoughts.

* * *

><p><em>AN_ - So, thanks for reading. It's been a bit weird coming back to this – I've been writing/plotting the other stories in the series, and they're basically hurt/comfort central. Sorry if these two chapters aren't up to scratch – I find myself not liking them very much. But anyway, thanks again for your support, and I hope to upload the next chapter on Tuesday. ^.^


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